On a thoroughly unserious note, apparently there was a multi-event World Cosplay Summit that Anime Expo was involved with in some fashion. It was "controversial", because some sort of modelling agency was behind the whole thing, and deliberately and transparently rigged the contest so that their pre-packaged set of Italian models "won". Apparently everyone else involved are volcanically pissed off about the whole thing, including the staff of Anime Expo. What a way to run a carnival...

The half of the blogsphere which isn't on Blogger or Typepad is down today. What, is the serverfarm for whatever service they're all using located in downtown New Orleans or something?

Goddamn it. A crucial levee gave way catastrophically last night about 1 AM Central. New Orleans is under water. NPR wasn't talking about it when I drove in an hour ago. What the hell?

There's nothing quite as embarrassing as apocalyptic fears and musings, written in darkness, then read in the light of day. Oh, well.

Sounds like New Orleans will survive to embarrass its collective self for at least one more Marti Gras. That's one vote from the nature caucus for "benevolent deity", I suppose.

A break in the fog.

Of course, where some folks might see the hand of god, others see the hidden hand of conspiratorial government. Would you rather live in a world controlled by a beneficient deity, or an all-powerful, secretive government? Yeah, me neither.

No creature on this earth is more prone to the search for signs and portents than the Christian strayed into agnostic doubt. A childhood's training to the search of the natural world for the traces of the divine and a lifetime's frustrated failure only hones the desire for evidence of the hand of God in nature's affair. This is why Intelligent Design often has friends in strange quarters, and why monstrous events breed wishful thinking as an application of poorly stored manure breeds flies - that is, like the plagues of Egypt.

New Orleans has a history of wickedness. She was a great slaver's entrepot, and a haven for pirates, and a home for famous whores. She was Babylon, and Sodom, and Gomorrah. Her centuries-long survival on the hurricane coast, increasingly exposed and vulnerable with each new grain of silt dropped by the heavy-laden and unnatural Mississippi, preserved in its precarious bed solely for the benefit of the wicked old port, has been a sort of secular miracle. Her continued existence is an argument for a God that loves mankind, even a fallen and savage mankind like that of the city of New Orleans. It is also a strong argument against the sort of vengeful, bitter god of justice and wrath who destroys evil cities and brutally enforces a communal law of shared guilt.

But just as every city is both Gomorrah and Jerusalem, New Orleans is also a city of believers, full of the faithful and innocents. Many of them, poor beyond escape, patiently lined up beside the Superdome, home of the Saints, their last sanctuary, a citadel, the highest ground the city has to offer. What does the sins of history have to do with a woman trying to save her family? She could get out, herself, but she stays with members of her family who could not. She says she has put her life in God's hand, and states for the record that if she should die, it is God's will. Ten honest men such as she, and how could God drown even such a city as New Orleans? On Bourbon Street, the fools party on as the stormclouds appear.

Joe Bastardi wailed all yesterday long, Centre County's own Jeremiah, crying Israel! O Israel! I could not see how the city could survive the storm, which would roll over her walls, smash in her levees, and sweep the hungry sea through her streets.

The morning has brought a thick fog through which I cannot see. The natural expectation is a disaster of biblical proportions. There are a hundred thousands trapped in an exposed city, and it is hard to see how the winds will not smash in the windows of their towers, how the waters will not rush over their walls and wash their elevated dead in a choleratic soup of past pestilences returned.

But the hurricane has weakened, inexplicably. She has shifted, eastwards - attracted, perhaps, by the new-born sins of the Mississippi casino coast? Will it be enough to spare the walls of the city? They say she could have withstood a Cat 3. It's now going to be a Cat 4. If New Orleans survives this, I cannot but say that it would shake my faith in doubt.

I sit in the fog, waiting for miracles.

They're done expanding the Walmart up on Benner Pike into a "SuperWalmart", and halfway done putting in that new arcade to it's immediate west. The effect is quite striking. What was once a wide-open field which gave a long view across the length and breadth of the valley towards the distant Bald Eagles is now yet another claustrophobic chunk of exurbia. It could be Cranberry Township, or Ocala, or Secausus. I'm not generally an anti-development blowhard, but I'll miss that empty field. It gave the Nittany Mall area an expansive feeling - a sense that we weren't being crowded in.

Oh, well. Everything changes.

Hey, sorry, there was more work awaiting my return from vacation than I really expected. I spend so much time twiddling my thumbs at work - how is it that I can take four days off and it's a mountain high enough to rival the Bald Eagles?

The con went well, I am told. A little exhausting, though - I'm not getting any younger. The membership cap did strange things to our attendance patterns - about 10% absenteeism from our prereg'd folks. I'm currently pondering if that means we can get away with a nine-percent increase in our cap, next year. There were about five news, network, or documentary crews trawling the convention, including MTV. Twenty years ago, having MTV come to something I helped run would have been infinitely cool. Nowadays? Meh.

There's a con policy against hand-signs or placards offering or requesting physical contact, especially in exchange for considerations - "will yaoi for pocky", "glomp me", etc. Aside from the horrid grammar and poor taste, our lawyer assured us that these signs represented invitations to solicitation, or offers of same. Definitely against the law, even in laid-back Baltimore. Thus, "spec ops" (the current designation of what was once upon a time, in a less litigious time, called con security) spent a significant amount of effort over the weekend on confiscating and collecting these signs. They had them taped together in a massive collage that took up most of the northern wall of the spec ops room. I dubbed it the "Wall of Glomp".

I had a friend in State College. His name was Robert Rector; he was constantly dropping in on us at Quest Labs and later at the Witch House. He was considerably older than any of us, by ten to twenty years. In a certain sense he was our "sempai", in that he had been a member of PSSFS forever and a day. He lived out in the borough, in a house he had bought for himself and his then-wife, who had left him not long before I first met him in '92 or so. The marvel wasn't that she left him, but that she had stayed around as long as she did.

Bob was a child in an adult's body. He didn't peel the wings off of flies, but he did snicker at the thought. He had a gross sense of humor, and a delight in the offense taken by others in just about everything. You can still find his comments in the PSSFS attendance sheets archives - look for the "Uncle Mo" and Dr. Jane Poynter entries. He was known for drawing sprawling immensely offensive cartoons on the chalkboards at PSSFS meetings, about the Challenger disaster, Michael Jackson child molestation rumors, and Deliverance-themed gags. He was mildly obsessed by Deliverance, at least partially because he bore something of a resemblance to Ned Beatty - one of his more annoying habits was "squealing like a pig" whenever somebody got homophobic or the subject came up - quite disturbing and a bit nerve-wracking if you were doing something else in the room at the time. Bob was endlessly embarrassing.

He was also more than a little racist. He would go on for hours about Marion Barry, racial quotas, and various other race-themed irritations, most of which I've expunged from my memory because I didn't want to dwell on Bob's race issues. He insisted that he was "black" and that he had color in the woodpile somewhere, and that if we'd ever meet his father, his father was much darker than he. I've since seen pictures of Bob's father, and Bob was selling a bill of goods. Bob just thought it was amusing that blacks insisted that they couldn't be racist, and tried to wedge himself in under that exemption. He loved NWA, and insisted on repeating fragments of their raps in pretty much the same spirit as the pig-squealing.

Bob didn't really work for a living, which always made me think a little less of him - I've got a serious Puritan work ethic bias going, I'm afraid. He said that he managed his family's investments, which seemed to us to be a silly sort of pretension, and that it meant that he was living off of his father's beneficence. Just recently, I discovered that his father had left $10 million dollars in bequests to both of his alma maters - $20 millions all told. Apparently Bob wasn't kidding about the investments - his father had been a surgeon, and the family wasn't old wealth or anything. Bob must really have made that killing on Pfizer that he said he did.

The last time I saw him, he and Dave had visited me at my new digs in Bellefonte, and we had gone out to eat at the Bellefonte Wok, where he insisted on making a series of anti-Chinese jokes in front of the waiters. I kind of yelled at him about that, and then I didn't see him any more. He continued to hang out at Dave's new place in Briarwood for a few more months, and then Dave got tired of his bullshit, and told him to get lost. And he did. And didn't come back. Eventually we noticed that his house was up for sale, and the assumption was that he had gotten tired of kids twenty years younger than him cursing him out, and went back to his parents' farm outside Chambersburg, where he and his father had entertained themselves by collecting tanks and other armored vehicles for their notational "Franklin Military Museum".

I wondered occasionally what happened to him, but I only found out last night, when an idle google search brought up his father's death and bequests. Bob hadn't been important enough for people to notice when he went away, but his father had been a pillar of the community, and he got column-inches, generously enough that they mentioned the fact that his sons had died before he passed. From here, I was able to find Bob's very brief death notices. Bob had died a few days after Dave told him to get lost, shortly after the New Year, in January 2001. We're still not sure what he died of, but he was overweight and lived alone, and our best guess is a heart attack.

For more than four years now, I've had Bob in the back of my mind, judging the world partially by how he would see it, how he would make fun of our increasing political correctness, our need for propriety, our need for decorum. I somehow assumed he was in somebody else's living room, bringing "tribute" and embarrassing the hell out of his hosts before others. It's very strange that the world has been without Bob for four and a half years now. I'm sorry that he's missed so much that would have brought him joy, even if that joy would have been mostly schadenfreude over our failures and petty evils. I can't imagine that a man who drew horrible cartoons of shuttle disasters and who once wore a Waffen-SS uniform through a convention full of rabbis missed something like the September 11 disasters. It just seems... unfair.

Goodbye, Bob.

A good deal of air has been let out of what remained of the "no global warming" argument.

As far as I can tell from the article and from a conversation with my meteorologist officemate, it goes like this:

One of the most important disagreements between observations and climatology models has been the daytime upper-atmosphere temperatures, which have been nonintuitively trending *downwards* since the Seventies, while everything else has been trending upwards, including *nightime* upper-atmosphere temperatures. What these guys from California are arguing is that this anomalous cooling trend is an artifact of improvements in weather-balloon technology.

The sensor-packages get warmed by direct sunlight, and the heat shielding technology before the mid-Seventies weren't good enough to keep this from biasing the temperature results. Whenever they introduced better shielding in the weather balloons used by a station or service, a discontinuity resulted in the data-stream. Since weather satellites' remote-sensing results were directly calibrated to the weather-balloon direct-sensing data, this bias was also present in pre-improvement satellite data as well, and if the re-calibration was done eventually against the new weather-balloons, the satellite data would no doubt have had something of a delay discontinuity, as they trumbled along on their own, only later being re-calibrated to the "new" standard temperatures. As my officemate notes, this should have been detected in the initial testing of the new technology, and probably can be demonstrated by running both sets of sensor packages off of the same weather-balloon, if you can still find the old models.

As far as I can tell, though, it seems as if authors of previous studies knew about the discontinuity effect, and had adjusted for it in some fashion. From some rather cryptic comments in the last third of the linked article, it sounds as if the authors of the new study are of the opinion that the previous corrections were incorrectly done, and that the discontinuity wasn't properly removed by the method used. Essentially, it's the same story as the infamous "hockey-stick", except it's biting against the anti-warming case this time. I can't go any further on that line without knowing more than what we're given in this article, and it's almost certain that I wouldn't understand the math specifics if I had them.

My officemate said that he never really credited the "no warming" argument, and points to significant Arctic icemelt and Alaskan permafrost melting as more important signifiers anyways. But he's not generally a "hair-on-fire" kind of guy, so YMMV.

HT to the guys at Rantburg, even if they don't seem to understand why an erroneously warmer Seventies and normal Eighties-to-the-present would give a false-positive cooling trend appearance.

Just pruning my blogroll a bit, elminating some snark, some people I'm not actually reading all that much, and getting rid of the distinctions - as if the people not labeled "friends" aren't, or the parts not labeled "the blogsphere" are somehow separate from the same.

This guy is feeling unlinked.. Let's see if he notices this. I was checking track-backs on one of Pixy's deliberate flamewar threads. Hey, at least he can do trackbacks. We freebie blogger untermenschen are too lowly and technically inept to be trusted with a powerful and dangerous tool like trackbacks. Kind of like those kids they insist on giving the safety scissors...

This is big shit. When Weldon and his "Able Danger" song-and-dance first came over the wires, I didn't get too excited, because Weldon is one of those Chicken Littles who always get hissy and hyper over flaky stuff which often turns out to be so much hot air. But they got the 9/11 Commission people to admit that A)"Able Danger" was real, B) "Able Danger" *did* get some sort of hit on Atta and three of the other 9/11 shahids and that C) somebody on the 9/11 Commission staff had been briefed by "Able Danger".

This means that the 9/11 Commission people suppressed information contrary to their conclusions, and as Geraghty argues, that it is now much more highly likely that the Clinton-era "wall" between security agencies, the military, and other security elements was directly and squarely responsible for the success of the 9/11 attacks. It also might help explain why we haven't had a repeat of the attacks - that after "the wall" was dismantled, large-scale would-be terrorist conspiracies are visible enough in the States to be caught or disrupted before they get anywhere near their targets.

If I might go out on a limb here... it's possible that we now know who was responsible for the 9/11 failures, and her name is Jamie Gorelick.

Update: Devil's advocate viewpoint, via a Minuteman link.

Second update: Whoops. A weekend later, and it turns out that Weldon has mostly led us off a cliff. No mention of Atta's name to the Commission people, and it kind of sounds as if Weldon's source didn't put 2 and 2 together on the "making" of Atta until pretty late in the game. I should have stayed with my first instinct, which was to dismiss Weldon as an excitable flake. Oops.

The middle part of Touch features the introduction of a taciturn replacement coach, who shows up, beats up the protagonist, makes everybody do drills in massed close order, fires the part-time manager love-interest, and generally carries on like your typical tough-love it's-for-the-kids-own-good Japanese-sports-ideal bullshitter.

This crap drives me absolutely nuts, and since the show uses dogs to make you sympathize with characters, and they give tough-love temp-coach a cute little brown puppy which he seems to like, I was crawling the walls in outrage, fighting against the narrative, if you know what I mean by that. The real-world versions of this kind of shitheel are brutal assholes, who practice a species of child-abuse, and the romanticization of this sort of behaviour is an abominable Japanese habit.

Then Touch surprised me. At first I put the new coach's habit of sending minors off to buy his beer and cigarettes down as a sort of Bad News Bears reference. I was still expecting them to find out that the coach is a quietly noble man who's doing it all for love of baseball. (Gag!) But his teaching methods are shown to drive off new club members, and causes lots of injuries. He *doesn't* teach the protagonist how to hit better, and intentionally screws with the club so that they're incapable of playing a game without being humiliated. He's portrayed as brutal, sadistic, cowardly in a subtle fashion, and totally irresponsible. In a show in which villains are notably absent - the players and coaches of other, rival teams are invariably either comically harmless or admirably noble, and the characters' responsible adults are generally feckless and mildly irresponsible - they suddenly produce an actual villain some fifty episodes into the story, and in the persona of an expected tough-love role-model!

Tres cool.

The writer really got me!

Ah-hah! They finally put up that piece on the year I ran the convention on said convention's website. A few typos here and there, but not too bad.

I'm taking a mild liking to the new Full Metal Panic series. It isn't really fun, like Fumoffu was, but it's much more engaging on an episode-by-episode basis. The last episode actually failed to make me hate Tessa, which is fairly unprecedented. It's not great television or anything, but it doesn't suck, which is more than I'll say for the last year or so's worth of television anime.

Touch continues to charm. The first season ended differently from how I recall the first movie ending, but I'm thinking that the TV version is better. Less sentimental and overwrought. I was thinking that they don't make decent sports anime any more, but then it occurred to me that I hadn't even paid attention to shounen football-anime Eyeshield 21. Should I?

Hah! Well-deserved slapdown. My bad.

I'm not surprised by the news - it makes some sort of sense, in that there was some sort of local connection given his circumstances of birth and all. It explains why the short-version web-factoid versions of the 104th Pennsylvania don't mention the name and its history, even. No room for company-level digressions in a half-dozen paragraphs.

Still, I'm surprised that they didn't mention the origin of the name on their history page. I'd think it's the sort of detail which makes a better connection between what the re-enactors do and the history of the unit itself. It's a selling point of their group-narrative, if you will.

I'm very, very disappointed in Lynn Herman, the state representative for State College, for whom I did a good deal of envelope-stuffing last year. The closer you look at HB 1521 and the circumstances surrounding it, the uglier it gets. Surprisingly enough, Bellefonte's own state rep., Benninghoff, voted against this end-run around the state constitution. Although I'm not particularly fond of Benninghoff, I have to give him and Hanna over on the other side of the mountain credit for voting against the pay-raise fan-dance. Hanna especially, given that he's technically a Democrat and they were reportedly enforcing party discipline with a meat-cleaveron the (D) side of the aisle on this bill.

Jake Corman, our state senator in this region, lived down to expectations and voted to fill his own pockets. What else would you expect of that ratfink bastard? But Herman... that hurts.

Heh. The first Israeli anime convention apparently had a decent first year in Tel Aviv. There's a line in the article about how such-and-such learned English "from Japanese cartoons".

But now I'm picturing the security guys at an Israeli anime con, wondering if a Palestinian would be both hip enough and crazy enough to show up in a costume packed with C4 and poisoned nails inside of the foam and colorful felt. Brr.

Via the still-maddeningly-un-perma-linked Anime News Network, which thankfully doesn't seem to have covered the whole driveby-musical-guest-thing yet.

Edit: whoops, apparently it *isn't* the first Israeli anime con, the con chair and organizer is just a typically full-of-shit self-promoter. Oh, well.

My convention made an announcement about a high-profile set of musical guests - they're going to do a drive-by panel appearance, whoop-de-friggin'-do - and TPTB put up a threat to close out the possibility of at-door registration, due to the whole membership-cap thing - if pre-reg creases 90% of the cap prior to the end of pre-reg, then I as the head of Reg will be directed to refuse to take at-door registration. I'm actually kind of worried that we'll just barely crease this 90% figure (actually 90.0909recursive%, but it's easier to say "90%"), leaving us at a number considerably lower than the hypothetical cap. This is a loss of over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, and I'm not exactly enthused about the prospect, regardless of how much less work it's going to represent on the part of myself and my department.

What I'm rooting for right now, is that we get either less than fourteen hundred-ish valid pre-reg attempts, or much more than that, in the next week before the cut-off. It's that deadly valley between 1400 and 3000 which freaks me out. Before this announcement, I was actually pretty confident that we weren't going to hit the subcap before the cut-off. The nature of the announcement is just marginal enough to produce a situation lodged firmly on the top of the fence, over the subcap, but short of the true cap.

I kind of wish they had just sat on this, and offered it as a special last-minute unannounced treat at the con proper.

One of my officemates is a marathon runner, and has a pretty fierce fear of flying. Somehow or another, he ended up committing to some sort of supermarathon called the Northwest Passage Marathon Races. His first time on an airplane, and he's going to be flying five legs from here in Centre County to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. They were just talking to him on his cel, panicking in Detroit, worried that he's going to miss his next connection. We were jokingly speculating on yesterday's hike as to whether he's going to be eaten by polar bears, or fall into the ocean, or just be sucked dry by those infamously huge Arctic mosquitoes. Good luck, Jeremy!

Went hiking with a group of guys from work up Shinglestown Gap yesterday afternoon. I was walking up front when I had a fairly-close encounter with a rattlesnake. It was the first time I'd seen one in the wild in Pennsylvania, although I had heard that there were rattlesnakes on Tussey Mountain. We noticed each other at a distance of about seven feet or so, and I never got any closer than that to this little sucker - two and a half feet at the most. The rest of the group was still pretty freaked out, and Ben ("Chromal") was yelling at me to get away from the snake. We all got off the trail to go around it, and at this point a family with a little kid and a dog off of its leash came down the opposite direction on the trail. It turned into a big production, and meanwhile Ben was taking pictures of the rattler, defensively curled up in a little coil. Ironically enough, Ben kept creeping closer, and probably *was* in striking range before we got him to get back. I tried tossing a stick at the snake to get it off the trail, but all that did was get it madder. We just gave up at that point, and by the time we came back on the return leg of the hike, it had slithered off to it's night-time burrow, whereever that was.

Article in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer about those goddamned AAVs the Marines are using in the Triangle. They're huge, vulnerable, and ancient. Those yahoos who were bitching about the Humvees last year *should* have been grousing about the AAVs, which are as old as the M113, and probably more dangerous to use. It's a big vehicle, which means that a IED hit on one of them has the potential to kill half a platoon if the explosion catches it right, such as what happened yesterday. They're not designed for urban warfare, as the article points out, and are really out of place on any battlefield away from the water. They've been used to some effect on riverine crossings in the area of al Anbar where that Ohio Marine unit was operating, but one can't help but feel that this sort of usage is unfortunately similar to the Marines' Vietnam-era habit of mounting multiple and frequent amphibious landings, just because that's what they're trained to do. I can't help but think that the AAV battalions ought to be cross-trained on LAV-25s, and deployed in them. They're much better patrol vehicles.

Unfortunately it sounds as if there's a limited inventory of LAVs, and it might be easier to re-equip them with the much more expensive and modern, non-amphibious Strykers, not that the Marines would like that much. But, since the Marines seem to be moving away from their old role as naval infantry anyways...

McClellan Rangers? If you were going to give a re-enactment group a "McClellan" name, why not go with a historical example, like the McClellan Dragoons? Of course, that would require the unit be a cavalry re-enactment group. Wonder if any of those exist? Apparently so. Check this one out - an Alabama mountain-Unionist cavalry reenactors' group.

Update: now, I wouldn't call the group bogus, Dimitri. They're technically re-enacting the 104th Pennsylvania, which was a Fourth Corps unit which fought under McClellan on the Peninsula. It's just that the 104th wasn't named after McClellan, nor was it the sort of light infantry, cavalry, militia, or irregular outfit which the name "Rangers" evokes. Fourth Corps isn't even really what you think of when you think "McClellan's AoP core" - that would be more Fifth Corps, you know? I suppose the McClellan Rangers might be making the Philadelphia connection, since both the unit and the general were both produced by the city.

Not that it really matters, I suppose. Different groups have different reasons for the units which they re-enact. I have a friend who's a member of the 9th Pennsylvania Reserves, which has all the color and specific history of Curtin's storied Pennsylvania Reserves. There's a company of the 148th Pennsylvania in my county, specifically because the 148th was also known as the "Centre County regiment", due to it being primarily recruited here in Centre County. There's even a 6th USCT reenactor's regiment down in Philadelphia, largely due to that unit's relationship with Philadelphia's wartime black society, I imagine.

Coming back into town about midnight last night, the first clue I had that something was wrong was that they had blocked off Water Street at the first light into town. At this point, I realized that the yellowish cloud over town was not a nighttime summer inversion of the gravel plant plume, but rather the smoke from yet another of Bellefonte's semiannual structure fires, some hundred-year-old building going up in fire as the result of ancient wiring or the misadventures of some ill-attended rugrat in low-rent housing. After following the traffic around the detour on the other side of Spring Creek, I came back into town and slowly crossed the bridge on High Street, noticing a couple of guys peering down off the bridge into the creek below, just down the street from the other side of the barricades on Water Street. I went on up and parked my car on my street, and came back to the Spring Street barricade to find out what had happened.

The guy manning the barricade - an emergency SUV pulled across the street, with a set of little hand-sized flashing red lights, like elaborate fire-alarms, arrayed across the pavement in a line - was a fireman, looking pretty bored at his picket duty. He tried to tell me what had happened - the "chemical company behind the Unimart on Water Street" had burned - but I got confused about what he was talking about, and kept asking if it was the abandoned Piezo-Kinetic plant further down the Axemann road. Anyways, it seems that there was a little chemical company - plant or warehouse, I'm still not exactly sure - back in that compound that I had thought was entirely the property of a car-repair place on Water Street. It looked pretty much like a dead loss from what I saw of it driving by this morning. Apparently it was full of industrial-strength cleaning chemicals - a lot of acids, mostly - and the fire was feared to have spread industrial poisons about pretty liberally.

The barricade-guy said that we were supposed to stay in our homes, close the windows, and turn on the air-conditioning while turning off the circulation fans. Since I don't have air conditioning, I was pretty much shit out of luck, but we agreed that the chemicals in question were most likely to be heavier than air, and that the noxious clouds shouldn't generally be able to make the climb up the hill I live on. Must've sucked to have been one of the people living in those houses under the bluff below Stoney Batter, though. The radio folk were talking about the possibility of a fish kill on Logan Run, which runs right behind the building in question, but the ducks in Tallyrand Park looked alive and well when I drove past this morning. We'll see if the enormous catfish below the pond at Tallyrand survive the accident.

Sorry I've been quiet. Not much to say. Busy at work, and with the con coming up, I'm supposed to be getting busy on that front, too. Trying to get a little exercise in as well, so's I'm not a foot-blistered casualty come contime.

Watching Touch, a pretty nifty Adachi baseball-anime - the original Adachi baseball anime, in fact. Dave was grousing about how long the episodes are, but heck, there were fewer commercials on the air in the mid-late Eighties. They seemed to have more animation budget back then, too. Which is a little hard to see, given the very simplified, iconic character designs, but it's there, trust me.

Now excuse me, it's my lunch hour, which means a lap around the industrial park while reading that collection of Walter Jon Williams stories that came in on Monday.